All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (43 page)

That is, Stanley was written to define Blanche by encircling her ooh-la-la with a blast of the truth that she cannot live with. Is she belle of the ball or town whore? Ask Stanley: he knows. “I want magic!” Blanche cries, but in Kazan’s
Streetcar
Stanley grabs all the magic. The final scene, in which a doctor and nurse take Blanche off to incarceration, finishes not Stanley’s but Blanche’s story: so it must be her play. Still, among them Williams, Kazan, and Brando retilted the piece in Stanley’s favor by inventing the Beautiful Male. Not John Barrymore beautiful, a Great Profile, but system-override beautiful, something for straight men to worry about. This new character came complete with defining uniform (close-fitting T and jeans deliberately shrunk onto Brando’s form specifically to be worn without undershorts) and unique diction. Like many gay intellectuals, Williams was fascinated by hot trash with a gift for creative lingo—Neal Cassady of the fifties beat scene is another such avatar—and Williams spent profusely of Brandospeak even before he knew the man existed:

STANLEY:
(going through Blanche’s trunk to pull up a fistful of costume jewelry) And what have we here? The treasure chest of a pirate!

STELLA:
Oh, Stanley!

STANLEY:
Pearls! Ropes of them! What is this sister of yours, a deep-sea diver who brings up sunken treasures? Or is she the champion safe-cracker of all time!

Blanche is an invention as well, the first of the “gay” cartoons that homophobic commentators enjoyed discerning in Williams, Inge, and Albee in the 1960s and ’70s. They note Blanche’s affectations and storytelling as if these were exclusively homosexual behaviors, and all but suggest that her rape is tricking by other means. Actually, Blanche’s style is not gay but southern, in the line of naggy Amanda Wingfield and secretly sensual Alma Winemiller of Williams’
Summer and Smoke
(1948). Williams is remarking that the coquettish palaver of southern womankind is
laden:
with frustration at the limitations that the culture forces upon it. In Mike Nichols’ burlesque, the typical Williams heroine suffers from “drink, prostitution, and puttin’ on ai-yuhs,”
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but what Blanche suffers from is insanity. The best Blanche I’ve seen, Jessica Lange, on Broadway in 1992, brought this forward in a portrayal so subtly long-lined that critics used to Bedlam Blanches missed her point. Her Stanley was Alec Baldwin, whose quick top-to-toe scoping of his sister-in-law when they first met gave extra point to his “We’ve had this date from the beginning” at the rape.

One would think excellent Stanleys even rarer than excellent Blanches, given Brando’s impact; yet some felt that the touring and London Stanley, Anthony Quinn, better caught the character’s animal gusto. Brando was a sometimes puzzling actor, so imaginative that he could enrich virtually any character into driver status. Quinn was simply a beast, easier to read. Brando’s replacement, Ralph Meeker, hewed more closely to Brando than to Quinn. Never truly famous, Meeker did help carve out the new niche in Beautiful Male casting. When the sailors returning from leave in
Mister Roberts
were unloaded from the cargo net, director Joshua Logan was keen to include a few hunks in tattered uniform, a form of innovative ribaldry irresistible to the closeted Logan; Ralph Meeker was one of those sailors. Later, Logan cast Meeker in the hunk role in William Inge’s
Picnic,
again to enter shining in his skin but also to have his shirt ripped open by Eileen Heckart in a moment of—quoting Hallie Flanagan—“Marlowesque madness.” Then, right at the center of what we think of as the prudish 1950s, the
Picnic
movie, with William Holden in Meeker’s role, set Kim Novak pawing a now absolutely unshirted (and shaved) Holden on the film’s poster, spreading the Beautiful Male news through the culture.

Stanleys greatly vary, because it has become such a titanic assumption in its original form that few actors are right for it. Many are wholly wrong. In 1956, at the City Center, Tallulah Bankhead’s Blanche faced off with Gerald O’Loughlin’s ordinary Stanley, though in the end Bankhead was really contending with the giggles and shrieks of her gay following. At one performance, she actually walked downstage and dropped character to plead for a fair hearing in a silent house. More recently, Natasha Richardson, under the clueless direction of Edward Hall, spent her time struggling with the accent, and her Stanley, John C. Reilly, was so miscast that the Stella got the notices. On one level,
Streetcar
is a duel between honesty and pretense—but Stanley wins not because he’s honest but because, in the world according to Tennessee Williams, beauty passes the laws.

The real driver in all this was Elia Kazan; Williams (and Miller) were his facilitators, the latter in
All My Sons
(1947) and
Death of a Salesman
(1949).
Salesman
of course has its own titanic assumption in Willy Loman, originated by Group veteran Lee J. Cobb—“the greatest dramatic actor I ever saw,” Miller himself wrote. Yet it would seem that the best talent outdid itself under Kazan’s direction. For a time, roughly the twenty years following World War II, Kazan’s name became the summoning term for the kind of director he now was: finished with screwball fun, with musicals, with Helen Hayes as Harriet Beecher Stowe, and with most unknown writers. Kazan was now the man in charge of the best plays.

Some found his productions overwrought; the authors never did, because Kazan brought out what was happening
under
the words. Of Kazan and
Streetcar,
John Mason Brown wrote, “He is able to capture to the full the inner no less than the outer action of the text.” And note how easily Kazan moved between the fantasist Williams and the pedagogical socialist Miller; note how different Stanley from Willy, the dream man from the patriarch but also the turbulent beauty in utter control of his pitch from the professional loser. There is, as well, Williams the entertainer opposed to Miller the enlightener. In Paris, in 1947, Miller spent an evening at a revival of
Ondine
watching the French have a love affair with Jean Giraudoux: “The language,” he wrote, “was saving their souls … The one unity left to them and thus their one hope.” Bored with the play itself, Miller “was moved by the tenderness of the people toward [Louis Jouvet,
Ondine
’s director and star], I who came from a theatre of combat with audiences.”

That is, while Williams thrilled, appalled, and loved his public, Miller kept trying to urge some sense into them, at first about the heartless and even criminal nature of American business ethics and then about the postwar purge of Communists that is very loosely referred to as “McCarthyism.” To do so, Miller found a parallel in the Salem witch trials of 1692, seeing in their religious hysteria the same mix of heroism (for instance from Joseph Welch, in his definitive “Have you no shame, at long last?” to McCarthy himself) and opportunism (from those too numerous to mention) that characterized the anti-Communist era. As all my readers know, this work is
The Crucible
(1953), whose title refers to a container used for calcination and, apropos of Miller and in Webster’s words, “a severe test.”

When Miller researched the Salem trials, he must have—as dog handlers put it—“alerted” when he discovered John Proctor, one of the accused, who petitioned five Boston ministers to transfer his and others’ cases or to send other judges to Salem, for the men they were facing had “condemned us already before our trials.” This sounded very much like the attitude of those judging Miller’s contemporaries under accusation. But then, tyrannies so often speak the same language that a victim of Mao Tse-tung, Nien Cheng, having seen
The Crucible
in Shanghai in 1980, told Miller that she was amazed that the play was not an autobiographical work by a Chinese. “Some of the interrogations,” she explained, “were precisely the same ones used on us in the Cultural Revolution.”

There is no facilitator in
The Crucible
. John Proctor drives the action all but alone, as the only fighting member of a group that will not confess to witchcraft. Just before his hanging, he is offered freedom … at the cost of Naming Names. One of American theatre’s great heroic parts, John Proctor thus mates chronicle play with social-problem play: because the work’s events have already taken place, yet the very intelligence of the piece hangs on whether or not he will pass the severe test.

Indeed, the work’s events were
still
taking place when
The Crucible
went into rehearsal, in late 1952. Miller took some liberties with the record, giving Proctor a melodrama’s subplot in which his marriage is ruined by his infidelity, his adulteress tries to kill Mrs. Proctor by demonizing her, and Proctor is helplessly ensnared in the case when he tries to save his wife by denouncing his whore and himself. The Greeks themselves couldn’t have tied it up more symmetrically.

And what a show for Elia Kazan to chew up and spit out: the ruthless judges, the very various Salem townsfolk, the little troop of bloodthirsty schoolgirls faking attacks, and of course the love triangle of good guy, cold saint, and evil trollop. The original cast is not Kazan-famous in the
Streetcar
or
Salesman
manner. Heading the company were Arthur Kennedy, Beatrice Straight, and Madeleine Sherwood in the triangle, E. G. Marshall as a witch-hunter who turns against the trials, and our old friend the now seventy-something Walter Hampden as the head judge, for whom no argument is inane if it will send someone to the noose.

It’s not exactly a Kazan cast because Kazan didn’t get the job: he had Informed when called to D.C., and Miller’s moral code forbade collaboration between the two, especially on a work that denounces informing. This can only be called courageous, because Kazan’s style was too new to claim acolytes, and for some reason that none of the communicants has explained, Miller’s producer, Kermit Bloomgarden, didn’t call on one of the Group stalwarts such as Harold Clurman or Robert Lewis; or one of the better journeymen like Bretaigne Windust or Michael Gordon; or one of the new hotshots like José Ferrer (mainly an actor, but also a director and for a time the head of the City Center’s theatre company). Because Bloomgarden actually ended up with the worst director on Broadway:

Jed Harris. This has-been had finally alienated so much of The Street that by the late 1940s he was about to fade away, broke and without the shred of a prospect. However, Harris’ mania for destructive behavior had not yet entirely beclouded his vision, and he made a comeback with a big classy hit in Ruth and Augustus Goetz’s
The Heiress
(1947). An adaptation of Henry James’
Washington Square
and more recently a vehicle for Cherry Jones, the play originally went out of town with the novel’s title and a tacked-on happy ending. The Goetzes hadn’t wanted to rewrite James but no producer would stage it as they wrote it, with the heroine implacably treading upstairs with her lamp while her fortune-hunting beau pounds at her door. Retitled, reworked, and restaged by Harris with Wendy Hiller, the play was saved, and all Broadway knew it.

But by the time Harris got to
The Crucible,
his loony anger had overtaken whatever talent he had left. One part of him could be eloquent in discovering character relationships with the actors; but most of him was a screaming idiot, singling out Cloris Leachman with such venom that she left the show during rehearsals.
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It was Harris’ odd notion that
The Crucible
should avoid movement, to strike poses suggestive of Dutch painting. What, with all Miller’s confrontational plotting, with people on trial for crimes they didn’t commit—that do not in fact exist? At some point, Harris started skipping rehearsals, leaving the unqualified Miller to try to direct in his place. Even so, the out-of-town premiere, in Wilmington, brought the house to its feet, and at the cries of “Author! Author!” that still occasionally reverberated in theatres then, he came forward: Jed Harris, warmly greeting his public while Kennedy and Marshall, on either side of him, openly gaped in, respectively, bewilderment and disgust.

Harris later pretended to Miller that the actors had dragged him onstage, though everyone had seen him pushing on unbeseeched. Besides, the notion that actors would drag Harris anywhere but to a cauldron of boiling oil was spectacularly implausible, unworthy of the Jed Harris who once held all Broadway in fee. His jig was up, and he herewith passes out of our narrative.

Interestingly, the fancy New York audience at
The Crucible
’s first night did not share Wilmington’s enthusiasm. Miller noticed an atmosphere of icy resentment settle over them once they realized that the show was not really about witches, and the reviews were all but dismissive. True, the actors never got the chance to put the play over as they might have done; Kazan would have had them blazing.
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And it is true that most people don’t like whistle-blowers: Miller was demanding that theatregoers discern and make war upon the new style in character assassination. (Remember Miller’s speaking of his “combat with audiences”?) But it is also true that Miller’s convenient parallel of witch-hunting and Red-baiting is part of the Big Lie that a portion of the American left has never admitted to. The notion of a Satanic conspiracy against Christianity is a fantasy. The notion of a Communist conspiracy against democracy is not, and the loathsome methods of the anti-Communist right do not “cancel out” the loathsomeness of Stalinism.

Complicating all this is the notion of The Names that the authorities demanded of the accused, as they do of John Proctor. Like the fresh, innocent soul you must produce to get out of your own contract with the devil, The Names constituted the only pardon. Everyone had to Name them, whether he or she had been a ruthless operative of Stalinism or an enabler of some kind; or one who flirted with Communism at a time when it was legal and chic to do so; or one who attended meetings out of curiosity; or who once went to a cocktail party that mysteriously turned into a Communist recruitment event; or even a guy who went to meetings to meet chicks.
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